Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. xv, 270 pp. (Tables, figures, maps.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-8836-6.
Elizabeth Remick’s Regulating Prostitution in China is a welcome contribution to the growing literature on modern Chinese state building. Similar to the best scholarship in this subfield of study, it offers a complex portrait of state-building initiatives that were developed over the course of the tumultuous first decades of the twentieth century. Building on her earlier work on taxation, public finance and local state building in Republican China, Remick deftly outlines three regulatory models deployed by Chinese cities beginning in the early 1900s, showing how local political histories gave rise to distinct trajectories in the bureaucratic management and regulation of prostitution. Remick’s most important contribution, however, lies in her attention to the ways in which local state building was composed of highly gendered processes with important consequences, as she argues, for the size, function and reach of the local state itself.
The impetus to regulate prostitution initially came from international pressure to address what was perceived to be the low status of Chinese women. But even if it was European powers that pressured the Qing government to do away with “white slavery,” it was not, ultimately, European models of regulation that were implemented. Instead, late Qing and Republican city administrators adapted from Japan’s approach to police reform in three distinct ways as a means of obtaining better public health and social control. Specifically, Remick discusses the emergence of three reform models as they developed locally: the “light” approach, the “revenue intensive” approach, and the “coercive-intensive approach.” The light approach, in which prostitution was lightly taxed and monitored, was adopted by most Chinese provincial capitals in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Focusing on Hangzhou, Remick offers a fascinating portrayal of failed police attempts to crack down on unlicensed prostitution during the mid-1920s, attempts that were followed by an even less successful intervention to phase out prostitution altogether. Remick’s description of the lively and well-attended protests that followed the city’s initiative to ban prostitution via lottery is a compelling account of how “‘big picture’ political commitments ran into trouble when local officials tried to implement them on the ground” (53).
Prostitutes working in Guangzhou would prove equally unwilling to conform to new forms of regulation. Remick opens her discussion of the revenue-intensive model as it was developed in Guangzhou with a vignette focused on prostitutes instigating a strike. Unlike in Hangzhou, however, where city officials made little off of the services of sex workers, the city of Guangzhou became so dependent on the tax revenue generated by prostitution that it willingly modified the new regulations in order to get the prostitutes back to work. Indeed, Guangzhou’s extraordinary dependence upon the 500,000 yuan that came in annually during the late 1920s and early 1930s exceeded the entire budget for social welfare expenditures. As Remick points out, these funds were not just an important component of the city’s budget but were, in fact, indispensable—a major factor in the resistance of local Guangzhou officials to the abolition movement.
The regulation of prostitution in Kunming, where the most extensive development of the “coercion-intensive” model was implemented, would prove to be far more intrusive in the lives of sex workers than it was in much of the rest of China. As managers of a “frontier town” in the late Qing and early Republican era, Kunming’s officials prioritized social order above all else. As a consequence, the highly militarized local government chose to segregate brothels from the rest of society by locating them within walled compounds, or jiyuan. Although the jiyuan system was subject to sharp societal critique and was even shut down for several years during the mid nineteen-teens, the police not only returned to this system but over the decades expanded their bureaucratic and physical control of the lives of sex workers through the implementation of extremely invasive health inspections. As the jiyuan system continued to evolve, prostitutes essentially became state employees complete with personnel files. The surplus revenues made by the jiyuan after 1923, in turn, were used to support social welfare projects, including a women’s social reformatory.
Explicit throughout Remick’s analysis of the local institutionalization of prostitution regulation during the late Qing, Warlord and Republican eras is the centrality of gender to these processes. The shifting political terrain and rapidly changing norms regarding the management of society in general, and the morality of women in particular, therefore not only influenced the regulation of prostitution, but also produced unique institutions such as the jiliangsuo, or prostitute rescue institutions, described by Remick in chapter 5. Indeed, central and local elites, police administrators, social reformers and Confucian scholars debated vigorously over how to best regulate prostitution or, in the case of a number of vocal opponents, to do away with prostitution altogether. As Remick makes clear, these debates were fueled as much by panic over the perceived immorality and public health threat of sex work, as they were about upholding an idealized version of the married, virtuous woman during a time of rapid change. At the same time, the defiance of women sex workers and brothel owners suggests the real limitations of the reform models as they were conceived and implemented. For although local approaches to prostitution regulation and reform engendered new and unexpected forms of state building, these approaches ultimately failed to meet many of their goals (other than generating enormous local revenues, in the case of Guangzhou).
In conclusion, Regulating Prostitution in China offers a unique contribution to the Chinese state-building literature and an important addition to the study of gender in late Qing and Republican China, and will enliven undergraduate and graduate courses focused on early twentieth-century Chinese history and gender and modern China
Kimberley Ens Manning
Concordia University, Montréal, Canada
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